Whether you are a nature enthusiast, book lover, young conservationist, student, teacher, or Refuge friend, you are invited to participate in America's WildRead community discussion. This blog is provided to you by the Friends of the National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Conservation Library. All are welcome!

One of the most haunting images in environmental literature is the opening fable in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In an unnamed village "in the heart of America," pesticides have stilled the lowing of cattle at daybreak, the afternoon droning of bees, the splashes of fish in the streams. Carson wrote, "On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh." Her tragic tale of poisoned hopes in a once-harmonious natural and human community is compounded by a bitter irony. "The people," Carson writes, "had done it themselves."
Carson’s allegory of an unseasonable hush prefaced a 1962 book that sparked public outrage over toxic chemical pollution and galvanized the modern environmental movement. But her blighted town suffers another silence rarely noted: the absence of children’s voices. A few youths in the story have been stricken and died after playing outside; the rest must be locked indoors, saved from the corrupted environment by being separated from it. Carson’s concern for children’s health imbues Silent Spring in discussions of birth defects, childhood cancers, and chromosomal damage from DDT and other persistent synthetic chemicals. In addressing the subject of children, the author opened herself to sexist attacks; one critic dismissed her scientific claims by saying, "I thought she was a spinster. What’s she so worried about genetics for?" But Carson refused to stand mute when faced with a moral imperative to speak out for the future.

In fact, she was envisioning a book about children’s relationships with nature in the late 1950s when research on hazardous pesticides overthrew her plans. The imagined work would have been an expansion of a 1956 essay, "Help Your Child to Wonder," published in Woman’s Home Companion. In the magazine piece, Carson recounts outings with her 2-year-old great-nephew, Roger, to the shores and woods near her cottage in Maine. One autumn night, she carries the blanket-wrapped toddler into a storm to feel rain on his face and hear thunderous waves pound the rocky shore. The pair laughs together in the dark, sharing "the same spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us." Already in 1956, Carson recognized that children, often living in cities and reared by busy parents with the increasing assistance of television, spent much of their time indoors. By toting Roger to the turbulent beach, his aunt shared with him a joy in wild nature she knew was denied to other boys and girls.

The "Wonder" essay is replete with such mild adventures, as Rachel leads Roger through the garden in search of insect songsters or joins him chasing ghost crabs across the sand. Parents are offered a few practical tips on initiating their own explorations, such as investing in a hand lens to reveal miniature worlds within forest moss or a drop of pond water. "With your child," Carson advises, "look at objects you take for granted as commonplace or uninteresting." But the purpose of such close observation is greater than "a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood." Rather, it is to awaken the child’s senses, expand her definition of self and community, and open his heart—in other words, to develop a receptivity to nature that Rachel Carson poetically deems the "sense of wonder." The capacity to wonder is so elemental to Carson that she professed an oft-quoted wish, "If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

Similar concerns expressed in Richard Louv’s 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, have sparked a growing movement to save our youngest generation from "nature deficit disorder." But decades earlier, Carson presaged the prospect of indoor childhoods in Silent Spring and enumerated solutions in the posthumously-published The Sense of Wonder. "A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful," Carson wrote, "full of wonder and excitement." Daily, intimate sensory experience is essential to keep that wonder bright for a lifetime, Carson asserted, and the early companionship of a responsive adult is the best way to make that happen. "By suggestion and example," she told parents, "I believe children can be helped to hear the many voices about them. Take the time to listen to the voices of the earth and what they mean—the majestic voice of thunder, the winds, the sound of surf or flowing streams."

Philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore sees Carson’s sense of wonder as a moral virtue that compels us to honor and celebrate the earth. As Moore avers, "The same impulse that says, this is wonderful, is the impulse that says, this must continue." As a walk in the woods can be an antidote for a child’s nature deficit disorder, sharing that walk between generations is a prescription against pesticide bioaccumulation, biodiversity decline, climate change, and other ills afflicting our planet. Leading a child to nature seems an elemental step we can all take each day. As Rachel Carson wrote, "Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with the lust for destruction."